Dan Rather is gobsmacked by the short memories of the delegates at the RNC. How could they have wiped their memories of the insurrection of January 6? How could they take pride in nominating a convicted felon? How could they opine for the Trump economy when Biden’s economy has been so successful? How could they endorse a man who still insists that he won in 2020 without a scintilla of evidence? Sore loser.
At their convention in Milwaukee, Republicans see themselves as celebrating what they are convinced is going to be not only a win in November, but an overwhelming one. Among delegates and others on the convention floor and around the hall, there is much chatter about an “avalanche” building.
This, as they have nominated for president a man who tried to overthrow our government.
Their hope is that a majority of voters will simply forget all Donald Trump has done to help himself and hurt this country. That strikes many Americans as falling in the narrow space between revolting and appalling.
And my goodness, the lies are flying fast and furious at the Republican fantasy convention. This glitzed-up affair is full of speeches that don’t even come close to the truth. Here’s how bad it is: Some major news organizations (although unfortunately not all) are fact-checking the speeches live, calling out the lies in real time.
But it’s more than that. Republicans must believe Americans are in a mood to forgive and forget. To forgive the insurrection of January 6 and forget the fact that the former president kept top-secret documents strewn about Mar-a-Lago like last month’s junk mail, among many other indiscretions.
How much airtime and how many column inches will be devoted this week to what the previous president has done to harm our democracy? My guess is almost none. Instead there will be a celebration, one devoid of context. It will be an anointing without proper perspective and analysis. And there will be misleading speech after misleading speech.
Tip of the Stetson to The Washington Post and The New York Times, whose fact-checkers are calling out a myriad of false claims. MSNBC is doing the same in real time. CNN is airing a fact-checking segment after the convention coverage. Unsurprisingly, Fox “News” is airing live speeches unchallenged and unchecked.
So far, the speeches have been riddled with stunning yet emphatically stated lies. Trump, the liar-in-chief, is getting a run for his money in the telling of tales. Over two days, the Post’s fact-checkers have found that convention speakers have made false claims about border crossings, gas prices, fentanyl, tax cuts, Vice President Kamala Harris, peace during Trump’s presidency, voting by migrants, energy independence, the relative wealth of young Americans, and Easter Sunday.
The lies and misinformation are meant to rile and to scare. Texas Senator Ted Cruz actually said this out loud from the convention podium: “Americans are dying, murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released.”
And then there’s the old chestnut, election denialism. According to the Post, 62 convention speakers have previously questioned President Biden’s 2020 election win.
Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis have capitulated, forgiving Trump for his miserable and untruthful treatment of them when they were running against him. They both gave speeches endorsing him on Tuesday night.
And don’t forget House Speaker Mike Johnson’s claim that the Republican Party is “the law and order team,” as it nominates a convicted felon.
It is no secret that the political nominating conventions lost their significance decades ago. Today, they are nothing more than hour upon hour of campaign advertising, which makes them a great place to court undecided voters. This MAGA convention will be hard-pressed to appeal to middle-of-the-roaders. Republicans can no longer claim to be the party of Lincoln or even of Reagan. It is wholly the party of Trump and his MAGA extremist followers. Their newly anointed vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, is even more extreme on issues like gun control and abortion than Trump.
Vance and the convention speakers are talking some about America’s need for unity, and that’s good, if they actually mean it. But after only two days, they seem to have abandoned the calls for unity and reverted back to the MAGA talking points. Against the backdrop of Republicans celebrating in Milwaukee, let’s hope that most of the rest of the country gives itself a gut check on Trump’s record and the reality of what his victory in November would mean.
Thom Hartmann explains here the importance of one of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent cases, in which the extremist majority overturned what is known as “the Chevron Deference.” When I first read about this decision, it sounded bad—it basically strips federal agencies of their regulatory powers—but I didn’t realize how bad this decision was the future of the nation until I read Hartmann’s article. He summarized the decision in this way: “The billionaires and polluters who bribed SCOTUS Republicans just legalized poisoning our children and grandchildren.”
In 1904, O. Henry coined the phrase “banana republic” to describe a country where the government supports big business for the exclusive benefit of the morbidly rich. A government of, by, and for what that generation called the “fatcats” or the “robber barons.”
The banana republic-ication of America just kicked into high gear, and, curiously, there’s been a virtual mainstream media blackout about it.
Here’s how it’s happening.
When Steve Bannon was in the Trump White House, he declared one of their goals was to “deconstruct the administrative state.” That same type of language also appears in Project 2025.
Now, fewer than two weeks ago, the six Republicans on the Supreme Court began that process by kneecapping the ability of regulatory agencies to protect the American people from out-of-control polluters, rip-off banks and insurance companies, Big Pharma, and hundreds of other industries and massive corporations that put profits above humans.
They did it by blowing up the Chevron Deference. It’s part of their long-term commitment to turning America into a billionaire- and corporate-run banana republic with an autocrat as president.
The case of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo ends the power of most regulatory agencies that are so hated by America’s most exploitative industries and the rightwing billionaires they’ve made.
As Senators Whitehouse, Hirono, Feinstein, and Warren noted:
“This case is the product of a decades-long effort by pro-corporate interests to eviscerate the federal government’s regulatory apparatus, to the detriment of the American people.”
So, how did the Supreme Court put the EPA and other regulatory agencies functionally out of business?
It has to do with something called the Chevron deference, a policy established by the Court decades ago to protect just such agencies.
Here’s how regulatory law — using the example of the EPA — is supposed to work (in super-simplified form):
1. Congress passes a law that says, for example, that the Environmental Protection Agency should limit the damage that pollutants in the environment cause to the planet. Congress (the Constitution’s Article I branch of government) defines the broad goal of the legislation, but the Executive Branch (Article II, which encompasses the EPA and other regulatory agencies) has the responsibility to carry it out.
2. The EPA, part of that Executive Branch and answering both to the law and the President, then convenes panels of experts. They spend a year or more doing an exhaustive, deep dive into the science, coming up with dozens or even hundreds of suggestions to limit airborne pollutants, ranging from rules on how much emission cars can expel to drilling and refining processes that may leak or pour poisons into our atmosphere, waters, etc.
3. The experts’ suggestions are then run past a panel of rule-making bureaucrats and hired-gun rule-making experts for the EPA to decide what the standards should be. They take into consideration the current abilities of industry and the costs versus the benefits of various rules, among other things.
4. After they’ve come up with those tentative regulations, they submit them for public review and hearings. When that process is done and a consensus is achieved, they make them into official EPA rules, publish them, enforce them, and the deadly emissions begin to drop.
This is how it worked, for example, with regard to CO2 until June of last year, a process that simply comports with common sense, as the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 when they established the Chevron deference to legitimize and defend our regulatory agencies.
Functionally, this process dates back to 1887, when Congress established America’s first regulatory agency — the Interstate Commerce Commission — to prevent railroads from ripping off shippers and passengers.
It was nailed into law and doctrine with the Chevron deference, articulated by the Supreme Court in 1984, reflecting a century-and-a-half of the will of Congress and presidents of both parties who signed regulatory agencies into existence. It says that once a regulatory agency does its due diligence and determines reasonable rules for a substance or behavior, they then have the legal authority to regulate and the courts should “defer” to the agency (thus the “deference” in the doctrine that emerged from the ruling when Chevron tried to negate an EPA ruling in 1984).
Congress passes laws that empower regulatory agencies to solve problems, the agencies figure out how to do that and put the rules into place, and the solutions get enforced by the agencies. And when somebody sues to overturn the rules, if the courts determine they were arrived at through a reasonable process without corruption, those rules stand.
Then came a group of rightwing Supreme Court justices — including Neil Gorsuch (the son of Reagan’s EPA Administrator, Anne Gorsuch, who resigned in disgrace after trying to destroy the agency — who overturned rules made by the EPA about CO2 emissions from power plants in their June, 2022 West Virginia v EPA decision, taking the first big bite out of the Chevron deference.
Their rationale was that because the legislation that created the EPA doesn’t specifically mention “regulating CO2” but instead let the EPA itself determine what pollutants are dangerous to America and the planet, the agency lacks that power to regulate CO2. And now it has lost that power, the result of that West Virginia v EPA decision two years ago.
The coal, oil, and natural gas industries have been popping champagne corks for two years now, as CO2 levels continue to increase along with the temperature of our planet and the violence of our weather.
In addition to Gorsuch, the Court’s decision-makers in West Virginia v EPA included Amy Coney Barrett whose father was a lawyer for Shell Oil for decades, and John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh who are all on the Court in part because of support from a network funded by fossil fuel billionaires and their industry (among others) that brought that case and then brought this year’s Loper v Raimondo.
And, of course, there’s Clarence “on the take” Thomas, who supported the Chevron deference 15 years ago but, since being wined and dined by rightwing billionaires, in 2020 wrote:
“Chevron compels judges to abdicate the judicial power without constitutional sanction. … Chevron also gives federal agencies unconstitutional power.”
Giving us a clue to how this went down, all six Republicans on the Court voted to gut the EPA’s ability to regulate CO2 in West Virginia; all 3 Democratic appointees opposed the decision.
“[D]oes not have a clue about how to address climate change…yet it appoints itself, instead of congress or the expert agency…the decision-maker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.”
Their ruling was, essentially, that all of that research into the specifics of anticipated regulations — all those hundreds of scientists, millions of public comments, and hundreds of thousands of science-hours invested in understanding problems and coming up with workable solutions — must now be done by Congress and the courts rather than administrative regulatory agencies.
As if Congress and the courts had the time and staff.
As if they was stocked with scientific experts, a much larger budget, and had millions of hours a year for hearings.
As if Republicans in the pockets of fossil fuel billionaires wouldn’t block any congressional action — or those billionaires wouldn’t lavish more gifts on Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Kavanaugh even if it did.
Republicans on the Supreme Court succeeded in dancing to the tune of the billionaire’s fossil fuel network in the West Virginia v EPA case, but it was narrowly focused on CO2.
In the Loper v Raimondo case, however, the Court explicitly expanded that victory by blowing the entire Chevron deference out of the water, thus ending or severely limiting most protective government regulations in America and opening the door to court challenges to every decision by every regulatory agency established since the last decades of the 19th century.
They’re saying, essentially, that the EPA (and any other regulatory agency) can’t do all the steps listed above: instead, that detailed and time-consuming analysis of a problem, developing specific solutions, and writing specific rules has to be done, they say, by Congress or the courts themselves.
A Congress where arcane rules and gerrymandering have given Republicans the ability to block pretty much any legislation their billionaire patrons pay them to block. And courts filled with lawyers who never set foot in a science classroom.
So now, starting just hours after the Loper Bright ruling, those industries and companies that have chafed under rules and regulations protecting us are on the march. They hope to rule the new banana republic the GOP envisions for us.
So far in the past two weeks, federal courts have stripped over 4 million Texas workers (and soon to be all Americans) of Department of Labor rules requiring overtime payments. It happened hours after the SCOTUS ruling, specifically referencing that ruling.
In Kansas on July 2nd, a federal judge ruled that Title IX “gender identity” non-discrimination protections promulgated by the Department of Education no longer apply to queer students, with the judge specifically citing and quotingLoper Bright:
“The Supreme Court recently held that [this] court ‘need not and under the APA may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.’ Loper Bright Enter. v. Raimondo. [This] court must exercise its ‘independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the APA requires.’”
It’s been fewer than two weeks since the Court accomplished what Trump and Project 2025 publicly aspired to, but the floodgates have opened.
Dozens of other challenges to protective regulations are already in the works, including, but not limited to:
“[R]egulation by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), healthcare and product reimbursement, white collar enforcement and investigations, intellectual property, Federal Trade Commission and antitrust enforcement, international trade and national security regulation, public company disclosures, environmental regulation, government contracting, business transactions, and litigation….”
Thousands more will soon clog the federal courts (including the legal status of mifepristone and birth control). The six Republicans on the Supreme Court have unleashed a legal tsunami that, if not reversed by Congress or through expanding the Court, threatens to take Americans back to 1876, when morbidly rich robber barons, landlords, and employers could rip off and poison Americans with impunity.
It’s past time to stand up and speak out, and Dick Durbin’s Senate Judiciary Committee is the logical place to start with subpoeas to bare this Court’s naked corruption. If you agree, you can find Durbin’s phone numbers and addresses here and a list of the Committee’s members here.
And, of course, we must vote a straight Democratic ticket this November.
Every day that goes by without these corrupt judges being held to account by the Senate is another day closer to the end of the functional “government of the people, by the people, [and] for the people,” and our final transition into a genuine, and perhaps irreversible, banana republic.
The United Federation of Teachers worked closely with NYC Mayor Eric Adams to persuade municipal union workers to give up Medicare and accept enrollment in a for-profit Medicare Advantage plan.
Many municipal retirees opposed the changeover. Unhappy retired municipal workers formed an organization which they called the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees. They concluded that the quality of their healthcare would decline if they accepted enrollment in a Medicare Advantage plan. MA might not accept their preferred doctors, and they would run the risk of being denied permission for treatment that their own doctor recommended. The retirees fought the city and their unions to block the switch to MA. They won in the state courts, and they won control of the retirees’ sector of the UFT.
Following the retirees’ victory in the courts and in the union elections, Michael Mulgrew announced that he would no longer support MA. Now the retirees are asking for the active help of the UFT.
As you know, we’ve been fighting for years to preserve our health care. The recent Retired Teacher Chapter election showed a healthy majority of our members want to continue with our current premium and co-pay free Medicare/Medigap plan. We were all encouraged that you dropped your support of the Medicare Advantage plan into which the city wishes to place us.
That said, we are still in trouble. As you know, Mayor Adams is fighting for the MA program, and appealing our recent victories to the NY State Court of Appeals. As you are no doubt aware, they are the highest court in the state and have the power to overturn our thus-far unbroken string of victories.
There are two ways we can prevail. One would be to win in court. Since UFT now opposes this plan, we need an Amicus brief from UFT. That’s quite important. If you oppose this plan, you need to demonstrate this to the court, and show that UFT is a force to be reckoned with. Mayor Eric Adams is, in fact, our contractual adversary, and we need to treat him as such.
This, of course, is not our only court battle. Mayor Adams also wants us to pay co-pays with our Medigap plan. That is unprecedented, and co-pays have a way of increasing endlessly. We need to halt this now.
I heard you say at a meeting that co-pays were intended only as a temporary stopgap measure. Given your statements about how the city is interested only in saving money at our expense, I think it’s fair to assume we can no longer trust the city to make any such measures temporary. Therefore, UFT needs to file an Amicus brief in our battle against additional expenses for retirees on fixed incomes. As you know, many of our retired brothers and sisters in DC37 are just getting by as is.
In 2016, MLC effectively suppressed the HIP rate, via so-called HIP/HMO Preferred. This resulted in additional costs for 40% of enrolled city employees. Obviously, it’s an error to tie this to the base rate, because I’m sure you want our members, and all city workers, compensated at the highest rate possible. This needs to be corrected, and we need your support to do so. I’m sure you don’t want retired UFT paraprofessionals paying co-pays, higher deductibles, and/or premiums. We will need UFT support in the upcoming Campion case so as to preclude this.
Our other avenue of protection is via the legislature. As you know, there are bills, set to be reintroduced, both in the city and state protecting Medicare and Medigap for retirees. Union support could make the key difference, particularly in the state. I’m told the state bill would have passed but for “union opposition.” I don’t know who in the union opposes this, but the recent RTC election shows our retirees overwhelmingly support it. In fact, I’d argue the overwhelming majority of city retirees do as well.
This brings me to my final point. Since unions, for whatever reason, have not been in the habit of protecting our current health care, the group NYC Retirees was formed. This group, entirely on donations, has been protecting us in court for years. The recent election demonstrates that UFT retirees support the goals of this group.
Therefore, it’s high time the UFT, perhaps through COPE, made a sizable donation. This is clearly the will of our chapter, and it’s time we honored that will with something more than words.
President Biden has been a great President. He has been an amazingly effective President, passing crucial legislation that helped ordinary Americans even though he has only a razor-thin margin in the Senate and none in the House. I have supported him vigorously, believing that he would do what was best for the country. I took offense at the media pile-on against him, even though I was stunned by his frail appearance and appalling performance at the June debate.
For weeks, the Democratic Party has been paralyzed by uncertainty about whether President JOE BIDEN should stay atop the ticket or step aside. But over the last 24 hours, that uncertainty has given way to a growing clarity about the reality facing the president: The walls are closing in, and his position leading the Democratic ticket appears increasingly unsustainable.
The president’s reelection bid has now lost the confidence of Congress’ senior-most Democratic leaders, as well of party elders around the country.
Rep. ADAM SCHIFF (D-Calif.), Pelosi’s longtime protégé, became the latest Hill Democrat to publicly call on Biden to step aside, arguing that he has “serious concerns about whether the President can defeat DONALD TRUMP,” and that it’s “time for him to pass the torch.”
Biden’s confidant and campaign adviser JEFFREY KATZENBERG confronted the president about new financial woes, telling him that big donors — skeptical that he can win — have all but stopped writing checks, Semafor’s Liz Hoffman and Ben Smith scooped.
Senior Democrats started privately circulating jarring numbers from Blue Rose Research, which found that “just 18 percent of voters and only 36 percent of people who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 believe he is mentally fit and up to the job of being president,” according to the NYT. Other super PAC polling shows “Biden’s deficit growing to 5 percentage points or more in the must-win states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.”
And DNC officials were pressured by their own party into pushing back a virtual roll call nominating Biden after an attempt to move it up was seen as a way of assuring Biden could run out the clock on the Dump Biden crowd.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has coordinated with senior Democrats to try to push Biden out. | Francis Chung/POLITICO
This flurry of stories yesterday is no accident. Senior Democrats had hoped to address this matter privately — Pelosi herself certainly advised members to try to do so, at least for a time.
But Biden and his inner circle have refused to listen. So now, Democrats are leaking tidbits of private conversations with the president himself, using the news media as a microphone to send a message: We’re no longer with you — and we will force you off the ticket, if needed.
“The speaker does not want to call on him to resign [as the Democratic nominee], but she will do everything in her power to make sure it happens,” one Pelosi ally we spoke with said.
The developments underscore a new, more public phase of the Dump Biden movement. It’s also an astonishing turn of events that puts Biden’s presidential bid on life support: With Democratic leaders like Pelosi, Schumer and Jeffries against him, how can he possibly continue?
My Twitter name is @DianeRavitch. I have about 146,000 followers. My account is instantly recognizable because it has my photo and a few symbolic emojis.
In late 2022, someone created a Twitter account called @Ravitch_Diane. It has no emojis, no photo and 81 followers.
The fake account has now taken control of my Twitter account. Anything I post goes to the fake Twitter account.
I tried to fill out the form to complain about the impersonation, sent my ID and photo, got verified, but failed to submit because the last instruction said, “Open your email account” before submitting. Each time I followed instructions but was unable to submit. The last hurdle made no sense.
Meanwhile I went to the fake account and saw that it was registered to an unfamiliar email. I couldn’t delete it or change it but I could change my birthdate and the handle. My birthdate is July 1, 1938. I changed it to another year, I forget which, but probably 2012. I was immediately locked out of Twitter because I’m too young! (Oh, to be 12 again!)
Not only was the fake account locked but so was my genuine account. This demonstrates that the two were interlocked. The hacker and I.
This is not the biggest problem in the world these days, but I would be grateful for your help.
Please contact X and ask them to ban the hacker, eliminate the fake account, and restore my real account.
When I changed the handle on the fake account, I made it now @goToMyRealAcct
I am now completely locked out and you alone can save me!
Needless to say, there is no customer service to whom one may speak. Like, a human being.
In a short period of time, friends of public schools in Nebraska collected enough signatures to get on the November ballot. That is, if a hostile state official doesn’t kick off enough names to render their petition invalid, as happened in Arkansas. Voucher pushers are terrified of referenda; vouchers always lose—by big margins.
Public school supporters surpass signature goal to put repeal of LB1402 voucher scheme on the November ballot
LINCOLN – They had only 67 days – the shortest timeline for a petition drive in the state’s history – and Nebraska public school supporters rose to the occasion, again.
The Support Our Schools Nebraska coalition needed to collect 61,621 signatures to let voters repeal or retain a bill that spends millions of public tax dollars to pay for private schools. Today, the coalition submitted more than 86,000 signatures to the Nebraska Secretary of State to ensure the issue will appear on the November ballot. The group also exceeded the 38-county requirement with 5% of voters signing the petition in more than 60 of the state’s 93 counties.
“Since last summer we’ve collected more than 200,000 signatures from Nebraskans who believe voters should decide whether public funds should be used to pay for private schools,” said Jenni Benson, Support Our Schools Nebraska sponsor and president of the Nebraska State Education Association. “The incredibly short timeline was a huge challenge, but Nebraskans wanted to sign this petition – many were appalled that LB1402 was passed to block citizens from voting on the issue and to impose a costly new voucher scheme on taxpayers.”
This is the second time Support Our Schools Nebraska has collected enough signatures to ensure voters have a say on a legislative bill that diverts public tax dollars to pay for private schools.
Last summer, the group gathered 117,415 signatures in 85 days to put the repeal of a previous voucher bill, LB753, on the November 2024 ballot. Even after the Secretary of State certified that the LB753 petition met all statutory and constitutional requirements to put the issue on the ballot for voters to decide, the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Lou Ann Linehan tried to have the Secretary of State take it off the ballot. When her attempt failed, she introduced LB1402, a bill that denied Nebraskans their right to vote on LB753’s voucher scheme while imposing a new costly voucher plan on Nebraska taxpayers.
“Despite attempts by a few politicians and some wealthy special interests to ignore the will of the people, Nebraskans have once again affirmed their support for public schools. This direct democracy effort is a testament to the resolve of the people of Nebraska and highlights the immense importance of public schools in our communities,” said Brad Christian-Sallis, Director of Power Building, Nebraska Table.
“Our Nebraska neighbors have made two things very clear: they expect that the state of Nebraska will make responsible investments with their tax dollars, and they love their public schools. That’s why they have turned out once again to have the chance to vote to repeal this legislation in November,” said Dr. Rebecca Firestone, Executive Director of OpenSky Policy Institute. “They have seen costs for similar programs balloon across the nation, like in Iowa, where the cost of the program is expected to triple, reaching $345 million in just two years, or Arizona, where the cost of its universal voucher program has exceeded budget projections by 1,346%.”
“The underestimated anger among voters about being denied their earlier chance to vote is palpable. I heard this sentiment frequently, often unsolicited, as voters lined up to sign the petition,” said Cynthia Peterson, president of the League of Women Voters of Lincoln-Lancaster County and representing the League of Women Voters of Nebraska.
“Nebraskans deserve the opportunity to vote on school vouchers—yes or no. Recently, even a nun signed our petition, jokingly acknowledging potential consequences but steadfast in her belief that voters should have the final say. Every Nebraska voter has a voice in our system of government. This referendum petition all boils down to letting the people decide.”
“Today, the people of Nebraska have once again exercised their constitutionally protected right to referendum, ensuring that their voices will always be heard. This moment stands as a testament to the deep and unwavering love Nebraskans have for their public schools, which remain the heart and soul of our communities. In this defining moment, we celebrate the power of democracy and the enduring spirit of our great state,” said Dunixi Guereca, Executive Director of Stand for Schools.
“PTA’s mission is to make every child’s potential a reality by engaging and empowering families and communities to advocate for all children. We value collaboration, commitment, diversity, respect, and accountability. Nebraska PTA is proud to stand with the Support Our Schools Nebraska Coalition. We align with the National PTA in advocating for the improvement of public education for all children and to guarantee that public funds are not diverted to any private school choice proposal and/or voucher systems,” said Christine Clerc, Executive Committee of the Nebraska PTA. “Public dollars must remain invested in public schools for the benefit of all students and the future of our nation. We are so grateful for all the individuals who have signed the petition and collected signatures so that we might continue the Nebraska tradition of strong public schools in every corner of our state.”
“Public Education is the great equalizer in ensuring that all children regardless of geographical or social location have access to learning, growing, achieving and giving back in service,” said Rev. Dr. Karla Cooper, LPS Foundation Board of Directors.
“The overwhelming success of the Support Our Schools campaign falls in line with what the majority of Nebraskans believe and support. According to the Institute’s 2023 public opinion poll, 64 percent of Nebraskans said they oppose using public dollars to subsidize private, religious, or charter schools. Simply put, state lawmakers should respect the will of the people and support our public education system, instead of undermining our community’s interests and priorities,” said Hadley Richters, CEO of the Holland Children’s Movement.
“Nebraskans have wisely rejected public funding of private institutions at the ballot box three times previously and we need to do so again,” said Tim Royers, a sponsor of Support Our Schools Nebraska and president of the Millard Education Association. “All we have to do is look at states with similar voucher programs. Those states and their taxpayers are struggling with the skyrocketing cost of these programs, as well as with the lack of transparency and accountability. Arizona’s voucher program is a fiasco with the governor there saying it will likely bankrupt the state, that it does not save taxpayers money, and it does not provide a better education for students. Our neighboring state of Iowa passed a voucher program last year. It led to a huge spike in private school tuition while the cost to state taxpayers far exceeds the initial estimates, growing to nearly $180 million for this coming year. We can avoid those problems by voting to repeal LB1402’s voucher scheme at the ballot box this November.”
This year’s sprint to collect signatures was a grassroots effort from a broad base of nonprofits supporting public schools.
The effort included more than 2,800 volunteers who circulated petitions and coordinated more than 800 signing events. More than 1,300 individuals have donated to the effort with an average donation of $42.
The Secretary of State will forward the petitions to local election officials, who have 40 days to verify the petitions and the signers’ information. Once all petitions have been reviewed and requirements met, the Secretary of State will certify the measure for the November 2024 General Election ballot.
For more information on the effort to repeal LB1402’s voucher scheme, please visit:
Dr. Paul Offit is an authority on vaccines and infectious diseases. Please read this post from his blog Beyond the Noise.
He writes:
On July 16, 2024, Brandy Zadrozny, an investigative reporter and journalist for NBC News, posted a video on X of a conversation between RFK Jr. and Donald Trump. “Whoops,” writes Zadrozny. “Seems like RFK Jr.’s son posted and has since deleted a video of a call between RFK Jr. and Trump.” When he realized that his son had posted the video, RFK Jr. was mortified. “When President Trump called me,” he wrote. “I was taping with an in-house videographer. I should have ordered the videographer to stop recording immediately. I am mortified that this was posted. I apologize to the president.”
Trump was talking to RFK Jr. about vaccines. “Something is wrong with the whole system,” said Trump. “Remember, I said you need small doses. Small doses. [Children receive] 38 different vaccines and it looks like it’s meant for a horse, not a 10 pound or 20-pound baby. And then you see the baby starting to change radically. And I’ve seen it too many times.”
None of this was new. Trump had repeated what he had said during a presidential debate on September 17, 2015. “Autism has become an epidemic that has gotten totally out of control,” he said, suggesting that high concentrations of vaccines given all at once was causing the problem. “Just the other day, two years old, two- and one-half years old, a child, a beautiful child went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick and is now autistic.” Trump said that he wanted vaccines to be given in “smaller doses over longer periods of time.” Donald Trump, a reality TV star, real estate developer, and politician is asking us to believe that his knowledge of phase 1 dose-ranging studies is greater than the scientists and physicians who evaluate those studies.
Alison Singer, the president and co-founder of the Autism Science Foundation and the mother of a child with autism, responded to that immediately. “Donald Trump is a part of a fringe movement that…[has] dangerously perpetuated the false link between vaccines and autism,” she said. “The facts are clear. Vaccines do not cause autism. Some people may not like the facts, but they don’t get to change them, even if they are running for president of the United States.”
The most worrisome part of the conversation between RFK Jr. and Donald Trump occurred at the end, when Trump said, “I would love for you to do something. And I think it would be good for you. [Because] we are going to win. We’re going to win.” Was Trump implying that RFK Jr. might have a place in his administration. If so, the public should be aware that no one has propagated more false information about vaccines and vaccine safety than RFK Jr. When asked on a recent podcast with Lex Fridman to name a vaccine that he thought was valuable, he couldn’t think of one. If RFK Jr. is given a place in the Trump administration, we can be sure that his vaccine disinformation, conspiracy theories, and false beliefs will be center stage, putting the health of children and this nation at risk.
Imagine RFK Jr. as head of the Centers for Disease Control. The Federal Drug Administration. Good grief!
David Frum was a speechwriter for George W. Bush. His views evolved, and he is now a Never-Trumper. He is a staff writer for The Atlantic, where this article appeared.
Frum wrote:
When a madman hammered nearly to death the husband of then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump jeered and mocked. One of Trump’s sons and other close Trump supporters avidly promoted false claims that Paul Pelosi had somehow brought the onslaught upon himself through a sexual misadventure.
After authorities apprehended a right-wing-extremist plot to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump belittled the threat at a rally. He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy. His supporters chanted “Lock her up.” Trump laughed and replied, “Lock them all up.”
Fascism feasts on violence. In the years since his own supporters attacked the Capitol to overturn the 2020 election—many of them threatening harm to Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence—Trump has championed the invaders, would-be kidnappers, and would-be murderers as martyrs and hostages. He has vowed to pardon them if returned to office. His own staffers have testified to the glee with which Trump watched the mayhem on television.
Now the bloodshed that Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well. The attempted murder of Trump—and the killing of a person nearby—is a horror and an outrage. More will be learned about the man who committed this appalling act, and who was killed by the Secret Service. Whatever his mania or motive, the only important thing about him is the law-enforcement mistake that allowed him to bring a deadly weapon so close to a campaign event and gain a sight line of the presidential candidate. His name should otherwise be erased and forgotten.
It is sadly incorrect to say, as so many have, that political violence “has no place” in American society. Assassinations, lynchings, riots, and pogroms have stained every page of American political history. That has remained true to the present day. In 2016, and even more in 2020, Trump supporters brought weapons to intimidate opponents and vote-counters. Trump and his supporters envision a new place for violence as their defining political message in the 2024 election.
Fascist movements are secular religions. Like all religions, they offer martyrs as their proof of truth. The Mussolini movement in Italy built imposing monuments to its fallen comrades. The Trump movement now improves on that: The leader himself will be the martyr in chief, his own blood the basis for his bid for power and vengeance.
The 2024 election was already shaping up as a symbolic contest between an elderly and weakening liberalism too frail and uncertain to protect itself and an authoritarian, reactionary movement ready to burst every barrier and trash every institution. To date, Trump has led only a minority of U.S. voters, but that minority’s passion and audacity have offset what it lacks in numbers. After the shooting, Trump and his backers hope to use the iconography of a bloody ear and face, raised fist, and call to “Fight!” to summon waverers to their cause of installing Trump as an anti-constitutional ruler, exempted from ordinary law by his allies on the Supreme Court.
Other societies have backslid to authoritarianism because of some extraordinary crisis: economic depression, hyperinflation, military defeat, civil strife. In 2024, U.S. troops are nowhere at war. The American economy is booming, providing spectacular and widely shared prosperity. A brief spasm of mild post-pandemic inflation has been overcome. Indicators of social health have abruptlyturned positive since Trump left office after years of deterioration during his term. Crime and fatal drug overdoses are declining in 2024; marriages and births are rising. Even the country’s problems indirectly confirm the country’s success: Migrants are crossing the border in the hundreds of thousands, because they know, even if Americans don’t, that the U.S. job market is among the hottest on Earth.
Yet despite all of this success, Americans are considering a form of self-harm that in other countries has typically followed the darkest national failures: letting the author of a failed coup d’état return to office to try again.
One reason this self-harm is nearing consummation is that American society is poorly prepared to understand and respond to radical challenges, once those challenges gain a certain mass. For nearly a century, “radical” in U.S. politics has usually meant “fringe”: Communists, Ku Kluxers, Black Panthers, Branch Davidians, Islamist jihadists. Radicals could be marginalized by the weight of the great American consensus that stretches from social democrats to business conservatives. Sometimes, a Joe McCarthy or a George Wallace would throw a scare into that mighty consensus, but in the past such challengers rarely formed stable coalitions with accepted stakeholders in society. Never gaining an enduring grip on the institutions of state, they flared up and burned out.
Trump is different. His abuses have been ratified by powerful constituencies. He has conquered and colonized one of the two major parties. He has defeated—or is on the way to defeating—every impeachment and prosecution to hold him to account for his frauds and crimes. He has assembled a mass following that is larger, more permanent, and more national in reach than any previous American demagogue. He has dominated the scene for nine years already, and he and his supporters hope they can use yesterday’s appalling event to extend the Trump era to the end of his life and beyond.
The American political and social system cannot treat such a person as an alien. It inevitably accommodates and naturalizes him. His counselors, even the thugs and felons, join the point-counterpoint dialogue at the summit of the American elite. President Joe Biden nearly wrecked his campaign because he felt obliged to meet Trump in debate. How could Biden have done otherwise? Trump is the three-time nominee of the Republican Party; it’s awkward and strange to treat him as an insurrectionist against the American state—though that’s what Trump was and is.
The despicable shooting at Trump, which also caused death and injury to others, now secures his undeserved position as a partner in the protective rituals of the democracy he despises. The appropriate expressions of dismay and condemnation from every prominent voice in American life have the additional effect of habituating Americans to Trump’s legitimacy. In the face of such an outrage, the familiar and proper practice is to stress unity, to proclaim that Americans have more things in common than that divide them. Those soothing words, true in the past, are less true now.
Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.
The Republican National Convention, which opens this week, will welcome to its stage apologists for Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its aggression against U.S. allies. Trump’s own infatuation with Russia and other dictatorships has not dimmed even slightly with age or experience. Yet all of these urgent and necessary truths must now be subordinated to the ritual invocation of “thoughts and prayers” for someone who never gave a thought or uttered a prayer for any of the victims of his own many incitements to bloodshed. The president who used his office to champion the rights of dangerous people to own military-type weapons says he was grazed by a bullet from one such assault rifle.
Conventional phrases and polite hypocrisy fill a useful function in social life. We say “Thank you for your service” both to the decorated hero and to the veteran who barely escaped dishonorable discharge. It’s easier than deciphering which was which. We wish “Happy New Year!” even when we dread the months ahead.
But conventional phrases don’t go unheard. They carry meanings, meanings no less powerful for being rote and reflexive. In rightly denouncing violence, we are extending an implicit pardon to the most violent person in contemporary U.S. politics. In asserting unity, we are absolving a man who seeks power through the humiliation and subordination of disdained others.
Those conventional phrases are inscribing Trump into a place in American life that he should have forfeited beyond redemption on January 6, 2021. All decent people welcome the sparing of his life. Trump’s reckoning should be with the orderly process of law, not with the bloodshed he rejoiced in when it befell others. He and his allies will exploit a gunman’s vicious criminality as their path to exonerate past crimes and empower new ones. Those who stand against Trump and his allies must find the will and the language to explain why these crimes, past and planned, are all wrong, all intolerable—and how the gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory, are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy.
On Monday, Judge Aileen “Loose” Cannon issued a mind-exploding ruling dismissing the espionage and obstruction case against Donald Trump. Her reason? The appointment of the Special Counsel was not legally authorized.
Let me first say this. Her ruling flies in the face of every legal precedent. No less than eight courts have weighed in on this question before and found to the contrary. Yet somehow Judge Cannon has defied all that legal weight and ruled against the U.S. government.
The timing of the ruling is also very suspect. Judge Cannon has been sitting on the motion to dismiss for 144 days. Yet she issued her ruling on the first day of the Republican National Convention? This smells like legal mischief. She is raising her hand for a quid pro quo appointment to a higher bench during a possible second Trump administration.
In today’s piece, I’ll walk through why Judge Cannon’s ruling is far outside of anything we have ever seen on this question. But while precedent would dictate that she should be reversed by the 11th Circuit, she could theoretically still prevail, setting up a split in the circuits for the Supreme Court to decide. And the current High Court has shown it doesn’t give a damn about decades of precedent. Indeed, that is Cannon’s likely gambit, and it is a dangerous one.
But if she loses, as is likely, she could also pay a heavy consequence: a reassignment of the case to another judge because of her clear bias for Trump.
Why she’s wrong
The language of both the Constitution and the authorizing legislation make clear that the Special Counsel is something the Executive Branch, via its Justice Department, may appoint.
Jack Smith argued that Congress vested the appointment of “inferior Officers” like the Special Counsel in 28 U.S.C. § 533(4), in which Congress authorized the Attorney General to appoint officials “to conduct such other investigations regarding official matters under the control of the Department of Justice…as may be directed by the Attorney General.”
Pretty damn clear if you ask me.
Before jumping into the legal arguments, it’s important to recognize how long and time-honored the tradition is of appointing Special Counsel to handle politically sensitive matters. President Ulysses S. Grant appointed one some 150 years ago in 1875 during the Whiskey Ring scandal, where distillers bribed Treasury officials to increase profits and evade taxes.
In the 1920s, there was a Special Counsel for the Teapot Dome scandal, where Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall became the first cabinet member ever sent to prison after he accepted bribes in exchange for petroleum leases.
The question of the Special Prosecutor’s authority in the Watergate investigation was first broached by the Supreme Court in U.S. v. Nixon. (Special Counsel was previously termed “Special Prosecutor.”) In that case, the Supreme Court unanimously signed off on the Special Prosecutor’s authority to issue a subpoena to Nixon for tapes of conversations.
Yet Judge Cannon, in her infinite wisdom, decided that U.S. v. Nixon was mere “dictum,” meaning reasoning not essential to the decision before her. She wrote that because Nixon never actually contested the Special Prosecutor’s validity, the question was not squarely before the Supreme Court.
Come on, Aileen.
It’s clear that the Supreme Court at least approved of the Special Counsel’s very existence. Otherwise, why even consider whether he could legally subpoena the President? Nixon didn’t challenge the very existence of the Special Counsel because it’s crystal clear that the Special Counsel was legally authorized, and no one on Nixon’s team even presumed to challenge the validity of the appointment.
Judge Cannon also ignored another Supreme Court precedent from 1988, Morrison v. Olson, which upheld a law called the Independent Counsel Act. Prosecutors have cited that decision over the decades to consistently argue that special counsels did not violate the separation of powers. Cannon rejected this argument, however, ruling that the statute it upheld had lapsed.
But Garland had cited four other statutes enacted by Congress—including the one discussed at the top of this section—that broadly authorized him to make Smith’s appointment. Yet Judge Cannon believes she somehow knows better than Congress about how to go about actually authorizing the appointment by statute.
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Matthew Stone of Education Week described the plans for K-12 education in a second Trump term, as they appear in Project 2025, a document written by hundreds of former Trump officials. The 44-page education section emphasizes eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, distributing its functions to other agencies, converting categorical funds (like Title I for low-income children) into block grants, and rooting out “critical race theory” and any recognition of the existence of LGBT students. The document emphasizes the primacy of parental rights.
Trump has distanced himself from the document, because its recommendations are so radical, but it was prepared under the watchful eye of Kevin Roberts, president of the ultra-rightwing Heritage Foundation. Roberts is a close associate of Trump’s.
Stone wrote:
What would Donald Trump do in the realm of K-12 if voters return the former president to the White House?
He and his campaign haven’t outlined many specifics, but a recently published document that details conservative plans to completely remake the executive branch offers some possibilities. Among them:
Title I, the $18 billion federal fund that supports low-income students, would disappear in a decade.
Federal special education funds would flow to school districts as block grants with no strings attached, or even to savings accounts for parents to use on private school or other education expenses.
The U.S. Department of Education would be eliminated.
The federal government’s ability to enforce civil rights laws in schools would be scaled back.
The proposals are contained in a comprehensive policy agenda that’s part of a Heritage Foundation-led initiative called Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project, which includes nearly 900 pages of detailed plans for virtually every corner of the federal government and a database of potential staffers for a conservative administration. It will also feature a playbook for the first 180 days of a new term.
The agenda is designed to be ready for a conservative president to implement at the start of a new administration next year, depending on the outcome of November’s election.
Project 2025 involves former Trump administration officials and other allies of the former president, as well as dozens of aligned advocacy organizations. One of those is Moms for Liberty, the Florida-based group that rose to national prominence fighting school boards over COVID-19 safety protocols and has endorsed conservative school board candidates across the country in recent years.
But because he’s released little in the way of detailed plans, Project 2025’s 44-page agenda for the U.S. Department of Education offers the clearest picture yet of the education priorities Trump could pursue in a second term, and how a second Trump administration could use the federal government to advance conservative policies like private school choice and parents’ rights that have taken root in many Republican-led states.
Trump is trying to distance himself from Project 2025 because it is so radical. But no one takes his protestations seriously.
Diane Ravitch's blog 